In 2008, I wrote a paper for the Cato Institute questioning the need for network neutrality regulations; I argued that the Internet's decentralized architecture made it inherently resistant to mischief by broadband incumbents. While I'm still skeptical about the wisdom of network neutrality regulations, I've become more concerned about the state of the broadband market in the four years since writing that paper. In a March article for National Affairs, I made a case for regulatory action to prevent further consolidation of the largest broadband firms.

What changed my thinking was less the theoretical arguments set out in that piece than it was a sequence of developments in the telecom marketplace, all of which forced me to reexamine my own assumptions about the state of US broadband.

America's broadband strategy isn't working very well. Unfortunately, it's not clear how to fix it. The experiences of other nations can yield useful insights, but such examples only get us so far.

We don’t talk the way we write, because if we did, we would all sound like assholes.

The contested history of US covert operations is part of the debate about who is to blame for the security situation on the Korean Peninsula. (Pretty much every disagreement about US national security policy comes down to whether the Soviets bear sole responsibility for starting the Cold War, a judgement that in turns depends heavily on accounts of Soviet responsibility for the Korean War. This is like walking into the First Council of Nicaea and saying loudly, “So explain this to me again. Jesus is god, but he is also the son …”)

and discussion of the Szechuan dry-frying technique

tostones as tostadas

toca-truck style

black peppercorns, cubeb, coriander, cumin, cardamom, cloves, allspice, cinnamon, anise seed, nutmeg, paprika, ginger, mace, turmeric, rose petals, lavender

two-player tactical boardgame about the Cold War

Balanced ternary, also called signed ternary, is a variation of Base-3 notation in which each digit can be expressed as either a negative one, a zero, or a positive one.

from The New Yorker (27 Sept 1999_

Fascinating as the chorded keyboard is, its confinement to the ghetto of “crackpot technology” is but a symptom of the underlying disease: the total victory of the technological business model which caters primarily to the unskilled.

Rare and Unpublished LIFE Magazine photos from 1955

web-based course-ware

in an era of growing inequality, the more unequal societies—like the United Kingdom and the United States—will likely not experience more mobility without concerted and effective public policy addressed not just to inequality but also to how families function, how the education system develops the human capital of relative disadvantaged children, and how families interact with a labour market that is increasingly more polarized

We are on the cusp of a complete overhaul of the way in which we interact with online content, [..] a future in which content is no longer entrenched in websites, but floats in orbit around users.

the creator of Johann Sebastian Joust discusses Yasunari Kawabata's 1951 novel The Master of Go

that representative democracies with near-universal franchises have only ever existed within populations with pyramid-shaped age distributions may be one of the hidden foundations of representative democracy. Representative democracy without this demographic bias towards young people is entirely untried

THE LONE RANGER
Contributed by Jeffrey Morgenthaler
INGREDIENTS:
1.5 oz Silver tequila
1 oz Lemon juice
.5 oz Rich simple syrup (two parts sugar, one part water)
2 oz Brut rosé sparkling wine
Garnish: Lemon twist
Glass: Collins

data visualization engine

Opening the pages of a modern near-future SF novel now invites a neck-chillingly cold draft of wind from the world we're trying to escape, rather than a warm narcotic vision of a better place and time.

And so I conclude: we will not inspire anyone with grand visions of a viable future through the medium of escapism. If we want to write inspirational literature with grand visions we need to dive into to the literary mainstream (which is finally rediscovering fabulism) and, adding a light admixture of Enlightenment ideology along the way, start writing the equivalent of those earnest and plausible hyper-realistic tales of Progress through cotton-planting on the shores of the Aral sea.

in crossword games, a "hook" is a letter that can be added to a word to form another word

an "anahook" is a letter that can be added to a set of letters to anagram a word; that set of letters is called a "stem"

an "anamonic" is a mnemonic phrase that states a stem and words formed by its anahooks

e.g. the stem SAUCER has anahooks CAT EATS BIRD OFF PLATE
e.g. SALTED - NUTS TROUBLED CHIPMUNK
e.g. TRIAGE - A MEDIC'S OFFENSIVE
e.g. AUNTIE - PAPA'S SIS LOVED QUICK SUGAR

anagrams
letter-pattern matches
Scrabble score calculation
rhyming
letter subsets
cryptograms

The idea of a team of goofballs embarking on some sort of quest seems increasingly quaint. The Lord Of The Rings films—giant ensemble pieces if ever there were giant ensemble pieces—were among the most technologically advanced ever made at the time of release, but their storytelling felt almost like a throwback, which might have contributed to the films’ massive crossover success.
It might seem as if the ensemble quest is increasingly a lost art, except that it migrated to TV. Because of the long hours required while shooting a dramatic TV series, the number of actors on most dramas has only increased since Hill Street Blues kicked off the trend toward serialized ensemble dramas in the early ’80s. The sorts of one-man shows that were common in the ’70s—Kojak, The Rockford Files, Columbo, etc.—are practically nonexistent now

Not every film needs to be like TV, but something about Whedon and Abrams’ work in that other medium seems to have made them uniquely suited to showing us large groups of characters bantering back and forth on the big screen

with the complete online Guide to the Enigma

interesting history of showrunner-vs-network execs

Art Shows, Events, and Projects

including the Law & Order coloring book

As you progress through the increasingly complex puzzles, Portal does something even cooler. It teaches you the game, it teaches you how to improvise solutions to the puzzles, and it eventually makes you a master of the Portal gun and its associated physics — without a single page of documentation. You learn about the Portal universe intimately, but you don’t notice the learning because you’re too busy playing.

each line of the song is anagramed

a PID on an Arduino to control fridge temp for homebrewing

a "cook-thru-the-book"-blog

"the compost cookie, which includes potato chips, pretzels, coffee grounds, oats, graham-cracker crumbs and chocolate and butterscotch chips, tastes like nothing in particular, as if the ingredients canceled out one another"

"I overheard a customer complaining to the counterwoman about the small size of his slice [of the crack pie]. He should have thanked her for saving his life."

"The mantra of excess reaches fruition in the behemoth layer cakes. In one, an unfortunate juxtaposition of chocolate chips and passion-fruit curd conjures a midnight run to the deli for a quart of Tropicana and cookie-dough ice cream, to be devoured on the couch while watching TV. This is cuisine for Harold and Kumar."

"A hefty knish called a volcano disgorges a gloppy mass of potato gratin, molten Gruyère, Mornay sauce, onions and bacon. Despite the high-end ingredients, its beige creaminess brought back queasy memories of my high school cafeteria."

"in the beginning was the command line"

Telehack is a simulation of a stylized arpanet/usenet, circa 1985-1990. It is a full multi-user simulation, including 25,000 hosts and BBS's the early net, thousands of files from the era, a collection of adventure and IF games, a working BASIC interpreter with a library of programs to run, simulated historical users, and more.